I agree that many of the couples we think of as monogamous are only socially monogamous.

But this doesn't mean that many, many couples are in hidden, happy open relationships; it means that many people are cheating on partners who wrongly believe them to be faithful (even if those partners don't always think of themselves as being in monogamous relationships, due to their own extra-marital activity).

The obvious solution to this is to be more socially tolerant of non-monogamy, both social and sexual, but social monogamy has served so great a cultural purpose over human history, that I think it's safe to assume it will always be the default and majority stance.

Mr Savage would have loved my father, the king of social-only monogamy. Who else would use his own children as camouflage?

@1

social monogamy has served so great a cultural purpose over human history...

Just curious if you could amplify that. Not calling you wrong, just curious to see what you think the benefits of monogamy are.

@3,

just curious to see what you think the benefits of monogamy are.

Saving cognitive (as well as physical and emotional) resources.

It's less cognitively taxing to promote and protect a single relationship than multiple ones.

It's also evolutionarily more beneficial for males as it ensures greater likelihood that offspring are theirs, and to females as it ensures greater likelihood males will give them their resources.

Smithsonian Magazine had a related article in its February issue, which I just got around to reading yesterday. It was about pair bonding in prairie voles, which have similar stats on monogamishness to those of the birds in the video.

Not so for meadow voles, which are nearly identical but don't pair up for life. Researchers took a prairie vole gene and injected it into a virus, which they introduced into brains of meadow voles.

The point? To see whether the alien DNA would alter the meadow vole’s behavior. It did: As the animals grew up, they began exhibiting pair-bonding behaviors. “We transformed a meadow vole into a prairie vole, behaviorally,” he says.

No word on how this might be applied to humans, but I worry it's only a matter of time.

@3: Well, not only does social monogamy (and with it the presumption of sexual monogamy) help regulate inheritance customs and laws, but it also extends to such things as establishing dynasties, car-design/sales, residential architecture, even knowing how to easily plan for the dinner party you're throwing.

Not to mention everything Urgutha Forka says far more seriously @4.

The presumption of sexual monogamy inherent in social monogamy is what's behind every love story ever told, from those in folk tales like "Cinderella," to modern rom-coms, to the western marriage ceremony. Culturally we like to believe in One True Love between Just Two People. Think of the conservative, Christian right's issue with what they call the homosexual lifestyle: that "lifestyle" that so upsets them is the idea of socially accepted, casual promiscuity. They fear that the social non-monogamy they see in what used to be the only visible segment of the gay population, a social non-monogamy they view as disgusting and a mockery of How Things Should Be might be catching (the argument can be made that it is and that a lot of straight people have already been infected, but that's a long way from being generally socially accepted as okay, let alone as preferable).

The reason that civil/human rights for gays has focused on marriage equality isn't coincidental. Approaching civil/human rights for people who are viewed as both sexually and socially deviant is a very difficult task. Hence marriage as the first big fight, although there are other battlegrounds on which this war could be waged. Because the desire to be married, to be socially and presumably sexually monogamous makes those seeking it less foreign, less threatening: Gays who want to get married: they're just like you! If the key to greater tolerance and acceptance, social, cultural, and legal, of LGBTs is that they're not really that different from you; that people are essentially the same; that once you know that your niece, neighbor, or mechanic is LGB or T, you have humanized her/him and are more likely to understand the need to extend equal rights and privileges to someone no longer demonized as "other," then it's easy to see why the focus of civil rights centers, at least for the time being, on marriage.

As we have discovered since California's Prop 8 passage in 2008, the best advertisements for arguments in favor of same-sex marriage feature young couples who publicly claim membership in the social monogamy club, families (children have historically been viewed as the primary beneficiaries of social monogamy), and old couples who have been socially monogamous a long, long time. The best and strongest arguments for marriage equality showcase loving, (presumably) monogamous--or at least socially monogamous--couples, who've often been together multiple decades. Those are the images that melt people's hearts.

If Edie Windsor had not been with Thea Spyer for many years as a socially monogamous couple, hers wouldn't have been the case used to eviscerate DOMA in US v. Windsor, even though the legal issue at the heart of the case had nothing to do with the length of time they had been a couple. I'm sure there are other inheritance-rights cases that could have been used, but since Windsor and Spyer appeared the model socially monogamous couple, with Windsor caring for Spyer throughout her illness and until her death, they were the test case, and not accidentally. Culturally we like to think of that old, happy couple, still together, still a partnership through life's hardships. The concept of social and presumed sexual monogamy dominates our domestic and romantic cultural imagination.

@2- It doesn't sound like your dad was behaving as Mr. Savage recommends, so I wouldn't think he'd love your dad. However your dad does sound like an example Mr. Savage would love to point to. There's a massive act of pretending going on in our culture, and it causes a lot of damage. If you strip all the lying away you've stripped away the damage of non-monogamy.

Mr Moody - You've caught on. One way or another Mr S would be delighted with him. I find Mr Savage rather too approving of social-only monogamy, but I have a stake in this one.

Ms Cute - How very depressing. Anything rather than such enforced overassimilation.

Of course, you can consider my depression a compliment to your eloquence in defence of something I quite loathe.

Mr.Ven:
I'm not defending anything. I was clarifying a point I'd made earlier. I don't know if I think that social monogamy is a good thing or not. I am all for honesty, I know that.

Ms Cute - Call it an explanation that was read as sufficiently thorough to pass for a defence.

I'll agree on honesty; I've no particular desire to go branding the socially-only monogamous - except when those of them who do so start braying in the role of being The Picture of (Genuine) Monogamy.

@2 Your dad sounds like what Dan would call a CPOS (cheating piece of shit). His stance on "social monogamy" is that it only works if everyone in the relationship is on board, with only a handful of very rareeditions based on extenuating circumstances.

@8- You have misunderstood me and Mr. Savage. He wouldn't be delighted "one way or another." He would be happy to point out a bad example and that is it.

@4 "It's also evolutionarily more beneficial for males as it ensures greater likelihood that offspring are theirs, and to females as it ensures greater likelihood males will give them their resources."

If that's your opinion of monogamy's benefices, it's pretty shallow, and you'll have to dig deeper to convince anyone.

Your female benefice of monogamy is a joke. Would a female, who'd be allowed by society to have an equal access to education and jobs, need male resources to raise her offsprings ? No. If a male can land a job that pays for a non-earning kids' raiser and kids, in an equal society a female would land a job that pays for the same. Getting access to a male's resources as a female benefice, is a sexist society's re-wording of its practice of preventing females from equal access to earning jobs - so that female survival can only be achieved by becoming a non-paid worker for a male.

And all that inequality and coercion based on no other grounds than having or not a piece of skin and tubes hanging between one's legs...

As for your male benefice of monogamy, it's nonsensical. Because sleeping around surely produces more "offspring that are theirs" than being sexually monogamous.

@2 vennominon

Well, my ex-husband and one of his mistresses did use her kids and mine as camouflage for some of their clothed meetings : "let's have the kids mingle, you can't say no to that, the kids love playing with each other !".

There was also a fellow schoolgirl who, when she was 5, would be given sweets from her mother and a man, if she would go sit on the stairs and be quiet for some time and take care of her little brother, and don't tell Daddy. Which she eventually did, without malice, when they were once chatting about sweets. She was from then on raised by her grandmother, and that's when I knew her. That's worse, since it was unclothed meetings. She had no kind words for her mother.